Tamarind Mem (4 page)

The Nigerian man was doing a technical course and was out every morning. In the afternoons, he relaxed in an easy chair on the verandah, staring out across the garden, occasionally looking down at the book on his lap. Some days he had visitors, but he was alone most of the time. I was curious about the man. In spite of Ma’s scolding, Linda Ayah insisted that he was a
hubshi,
perhaps even a genie from my Arabian Nights storybook.

“His eyes are actually ears and his mouth is his magic eye,” she warned. “You better stay inside the house when your mother sleeps in the afternoon. Otherwise he might stuff you inside a bottle and take you back with him to Afreeka!”

I was almost certain that Linda Ayah was only trying to get me out of her hair while she gossiped with her cronies. But what if the man next door was really a
hubshi?
I wouldn’t know till I saw his palms, for
hubshis
had green palms.

One afternoon, while Ma napped, I sat in our shady verandah and played with my toys, clattering the miniature stainless-steel vessels of my cooking set to assure her that I was not getting into any trouble. As soon as she and Roopa were asleep, I slipped out of the verandah and crept through the hole in the green rustling hedge on to the cement path running around the transit house, my bare feet scorched by the baking surface. One-two-three, I counted in my head as I crossed the door of each apartment. I hoped the man would be in his usual chair in the verandah.

Three bamboo screens marked the end of an apartment, and when I reached the third one, I held my breath and
stood shivering with fear. There were so many things to be afraid of. But I had my excuses ready. If Ma woke up suddenly and found me gone, I could say, “Ma, I was looking for Linda Ayah.” And if Linda Ayah saw me sneaking around, I could threaten to tell Ma that she had left me alone. However, if the man glanced this way and saw me peering through the slats of the screen, he would transform me into a moth and cork me inside a bottle. I gazed at him, noting every little crease in his sleeping face, his tight curls of hair and the backs of his hands as they rested on the arms of the easy chair. Why didn’t he turn his hands so that I could see the colour of his palms?

He stood up suddenly and stretched, yawned widely, then moved towards the screen and tugged on the cord that rolled it up. I stood there like a petrified squirrel. Saw his feet in blue rubber slippers, the kind you got from the pavement vendor for a couple of rupees. Then the soft cuffs of his white trousers, higher and higher, past the blue-and-white-checked shirt up to his face. He was still looking up at the
chik
as it piled in a roll near the high ceiling of the verandah. I could have run away and he might not even have noticed, but my feet were stuck to the ground: he had cast a magic spell, just as Linda Ayah had warned. I could feel myself turning into a moth. He glanced down at me and his face fell open, astonished.

“Ooo!” he said, and I turned and ran then, before he could sing the rest of his spells, before he could make my feet become dark furry wings. I squeezed through the hedge and ran into my room. Perhaps he wouldn’t realize that I lived in this house. He hadn’t actually seen me going
into
the house. Perhaps he had not seen me at all, for the sun was in his eyes.

I didn’t go out of the house the next day. I was so quiet that Ma noticed and asked what was the matter with me.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “I just feel like playing inside today.”

“Must be bored, poor child,” said Ma. “Maybe we’ll visit Simoes Aunty, you can play with Lily.”

Ma thought that Lily was a sweet child and a good influence on me. She was actually a sneaky pie-face who cried when she lost a game. Lily had pinched Roopa the last time she’d visited. I’d seen her pinch my sister and make her cry and I’d said so.

Mrs. Simoes had raised her eyebrows, pulled my cheek and said, “What a little story-teller you are! My Lily loves babies. She keeps asking me when I am going to get her one.” She laughed in a silly way.

Ma smiled as well but she was annoyed. She knew that there were some things about which I would never make up stories. And even if I did, nobody was allowed to comment but her.

“I think I have a headache,” I lied, not looking at Ma. If you looked your mother in the eye and told a fib she would turn to stone.

Ma touched my forehead and gave me lots of water to drink.

“We have to go and meet the Loretto School principal tomorrow,” she said anxiously. “You can’t fall ill, it’s so difficult to get an appointment with those people.”

“Lily Simoes is a liar and she makes me sick,” I confessed. “I don’t want to play with her.”

Ma sighed. “All right, don’t go out in the sun, then. And don’t tease Linda Ayah.”

Two afternoons later, when Ma took her nap, I crawled through the hedge again. I couldn’t see anyone in the verandah; the screens were rolled up and rattled slightly in the breeze. So I was startled when the Nigerian’s apartment door banged open and he appeared suddenly. He glanced down the length of the verandah, spotted me and smiled. “Hey, little girl,” he called. “What you doing there, eh?”

He knew that I was the nosy-parker girl and now he was going to yell at me. I edged back towards the safety of the besharam hedge. Would he catch me before I could squeeze through the hole to my own garden? Did it hurt to be turned into a moth and put in a bottle? My mouth was dry, my ponytail stuck to my neck.

“Hey, hey!” said the man, his voice so loud in the still afternoon. “Visiting your neighbour? I met your Daddy at work today.”

Don’t
shout
so, I thought, Ma might wake up. Linda Ayah might come running to see what’s going on.

He knew my Dadda, so he couldn’t be bad. He also had pink palms, I could see that now. He was not a
hubshi.

“I am sorry I was peeping at you,” I said.

“Ah, a curious girl aren’t you? Not as curious as my little girl, though.”

“You have a little girl?”

“Yes, yes, and two boys, but my little girl is the smart one, eh?”

“What does she do?”

“She reads books better than her Daddy and Mam, that’s what,” said the man. “Can you read?”

“Of course I can!” I replied. “Does your little girl read about Nora and Tilly?”

“I don’t know about Noratilly, but she knows Tongua the jackal and Nubi the Mighty King,” said the man. “Do you want to hear those stories? Better than your Noratilly.”

He stared out at the garden. “In a river lived a wicked crocodile and across the river lived Nubi the Mighty Who Ruled the Land,” he began, and I was instantly entranced. The story ended quickly, however, and the man said in a soft, sad voice, “That happened long-long ago when the land was green and the river heavy with water.”

“And now, isn’t the land green now?” I was puzzled by the change in his voice, for when he told the story it became singsong, swinging up and down, assuming different pitches for the various characters: the crocodile, the king, the jackals and the little princess who could balance ten pots of water on her head without dropping a single one.

“No, now it is as brown as these little sparrows,” he said pointing at the tiny chattering birds hopping on the dusty grass growing through the cracks in the cement paving outside the verandah.

“My Linda Ayah can catch the sparrows in her sari,” I said.

“Why you want to catch those little fellows, eh?”

“I don’t keep them,” I said, a little frightened. I had remained standing through the story, poised to run down the verandah if the man showed any sign of anger. “I just look at them and let them fly away.”

“I’ll show you something,” said the man. “Wait here.”

He went into his apartment and returned a few minutes later with a few grains of rice in his hand. “Now keep very still and watch,” he said, squatting on the edge of the verandah and stretching his hand out slowly to where the
sparrows pecked and hopped. The grains of rice sat invitingly on his pink palm. The sparrows hopped closer to the palm, pecking ceaselessly at the dry ground. Then a daring one fluttered on to his hand, picked up a grain and flew away. Another sparrow did the same thing. The man sat motionless as a third sparrow landed on the outstretched palm. It did not fly away; instead it stayed there as the man gently closed his fingers around the tiny body and stroked its head.

“See,” he said, “not afraid of me. It says to itself, this man, he is kind, he won’t hurt any living thing.”

He opened his hand and the bird flew down to the ground again, throwing up little pinwheels of dust as it scrabbled for grains of rice. Outside the sun was low in the sky, ready to drop beneath the horizon. A
peon
was making his way down the verandah, rolling up the rest of the screens and letting in cool evening air. I heard my mother calling me in for tea and got up reluctantly.

“Do you know any more stories?”

“Maybe,” he said, grinning. “Question number two?”

“Why are you black?” It was a question that had been nagging me ever since I saw the multicoloured Anglo-Indians at the railway station. Where did all these people get their colour from?

The man smiled and asked quizzically, “Why are you brown, little girl?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He shrugged too and said, “And I don’t know either.”

Ma’s insistent “Mini, Kamini, come and get your tiffin” echoed down the verandah.

“What were you doing, talking to unknown people?” she demanded, shaking me hard. She had been waiting to
catch me as I crawled back through the hedge. “How many times do I have to tell you, don’t talk to anybody-everybody!”

“But Ma, he was telling me stories about Africa!”

“Stories, stories, stories!” said Ma, shaking me again. “Some person on the road says ‘Come child, I will tell you stories,’ and this idiot girl will go behind him, no problem! Do you ever listen to me?”

“Never listens, whattodo?” sighed Linda Ayah, materializing from somewhere.

“And where were you?” asked Ma. “You are supposed to make sure that she doesn’t get into any mischief.”

“Memsahib, my eyes blinked once only and this monkey had vanished. What can I do?” protested Linda Ayah.

“Liar-liar-lipstick,” I chanted immediately. “You were sitting behind the building doing
khusur-phusur
with the other
ayahs.”

“Ma, do you know where Linda Ayah is now?” I asked, hit by a wave of nostalgia so strong that I had called my mother at 11:00 a.m. Indian time, when the rates were at their highest.

“I have no idea. Maybe she went back to her village. Maybe I will stop at her village on my trip,” remarked Ma.

“Trip, what trip?”

“I am going on a train journey, across the country.”

“With Lalli Aunty?” I was pleased that my mother was going to do something other than sit in her apartment quarrelling with the milkman or her latest maidservant. Ma seemed to have a new one every few months or so. “Whattodo?” she had said, when I remarked on it. “This is the real world. Not like our Railway life, with faithful Linda Ayah and Ganesh Peon.”

“Are you going with Lalli Aunty?” I asked again.

“Why should I go with her? Am I incapable of doing anything myself?”

“All right, all right, but where are you going?”

“Everywhere,” snapped Ma irascibly. “Do I ask you all about your coming and going? Do I ask you why you have to live in the North Pole, hanh? Did I ask your sister why she ran away?”

“Ma, Roopa got married. She did not run away.”

“She left college in the middle of the term, came home with a man we had never met. He might have belonged to a family of pimps for all I knew. And then she married him in less than a month—so suspicious it looked—and left for USA! Of course she ran away.”

“Roopa’s husband is a perfectly nice man, Ma,” I protested feebly.

“And now,” continued my mother, “it is my turn to go away.”

“At least give us an address to write to,” I said. I could feel a tension headache coming on. It didn’t matter how far away I was, all my conversations with my mother ended in an argument.